Faculty Spotlight

Timothy C. Beers

Notre Dame Chair in Astrophysics

Astrophysicist Timothy Beers only needs 100 stars out of the 100 billion in the universe to help prove one of the longest-held theories in the field. However, finding those stars—the brightest, low-metallicity stars in the Milky Way— is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Dervis Can Vural

Assistant Professor of Physics

Most research within the field of physics focuses on predicting the future. But how rapidly does our knowledge of the past deteriorate? Consider a sugar cube dissolving in water. “If you know the initial shape of the sugar cube, it is very easy to predict the concentration of sugar over time,” said Dervis Can Vural, assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Notre Dame. “But given the final state—a sweet cup of water—it is very difficult to ‘retrodict’ the original shape of the sugar cube. The process is irreversible and you’ve lost that information.”

Zoltan Toroczkai

Professor of Physics

Toroczkai and collaborators have been working toward developing a novel mathematical approach that will help advance computation beyond the digital framework. His recent paper, published in Nature Communications, describes a new mathematical, analog “solver” that can potentially find the best solution to NP-hard problems.